The words, acidic and rude, poured out of my mouth so quickly, I couldn't even stop to analyze how terrible I sounded. This wasn't me! I was nice to strangers! one part of my brain screamed, but the overwhelming vitriol I felt toward him and his handsome face muted that shit pretty fast.
His truck door popped open, and when he unfolded out of his seat, to his full height, I swallowed heavily. Captain America was easily six-five, and as broad as a tree trunk. Bearded though he was, his hair was immaculate, same as his truck, which gleamed like it'd been freshly waxed.
His thick legs were covered in dark denim, and the simple white T-shirt stretched over his broad chest was as blinding as his poster boy grin.
"I'm Tucker, pleasure to meet you." He held out his hand and I narrowed my eyes at that too.
A bitchy-faced alien had taken over my body because every part of me was responding without a single conscious thought on my end.
I’d never narrowed my eyes this frequently in my entire friggin’ life.
"Uh-huh. Can I borrow your phone, please?"
With a rueful grin, he pulled his hand back. "You can try to get through to your aunt," he said, pulling his phone from his front pocket, "but pretty as this stretch is, it doesn't get much in the way of service, no matter which carrier you have."
"Great," I mumbled, pulling up Aunt Fran's number on my phone so I could dial it into his. While I did that, he ambled over to the opened hood of my car and braced his arms in the same way I had.
Except I didn't have bulging forearm muscles or veins that popped.
Not that I was looking.
I screwed my lips up when his phone wouldn't connect the call either, finally punching the red button on his screen a little bit harder than I needed to.
The way my body was reacting to his presence could only be described as weird. Really, really weird.
Have you played with magnets? You flip one of them the wrong way, and they instantly repel each other. No matter what you do, you’ll never get them to snap in place.
There’s a force field between those incorrectly flipped magnets—invisible and impenetrable—that you’ll never be able to overcome with your mind.
I wanted to take a step closer, see what he was looking at in my car, and try to start over.
But my body wouldn’t. A steel wall between us couldn’t have been more effective, because when my brain screamed at my feet to move, at my tongue to say something nicer, sweeter, with a bucket-load more gratitude, I couldn’t do any of those things.
The signals being sent to my hands and arms and feet and facial expressions was an all caps command that WE DO NOT LIKE THIS PERSON.
Maybe this was a really extreme case of hangry. I rubbed my forehead and tried to remember the last time I ate. Was the apple an hour ago? Or two?
Was I hallucinating this entire exchange? Because that would be a loss of sanity I could accept.
"Where's your aunt from?" he asked, eyes down while his large hand checked a few knobs or belts or whatever.
I held my snort at his question, because this was the south. In California, we went out of our way not to ask stranger's questions for fear that they might engage us in conversation.
"Can you see what's wrong?" I asked in lieu of an answer.
He wasn't fooled, judging by the way his cheeks lifted, as if he was smiling.
"Not yet." He glanced up, eyes dark, dark brown in his face. "Might be your alternator, or your distributor sensor, if it just died while you were driving."
"Dead as a fucking doornail," I muttered, resisting the urge to kick the back tire of my car.
He whistled softly.
"What? Did you find what's wrong?"
"No, ma'am, just don't usually hear a woman curse like that in front of a stranger."
"Yeah well, I'm not from around here, if you hadn't fucking noticed," I said. "I curse in front of whoever I damn well please."
Oh
My
Good
Lord
what was wrong with me?
"Good for you," he said, completely unruffled. He stood and crossed his arms over his chest and let his eyes roam my face, unhurried and without any attempt to hide his curiosity.
Why didn’t he say anything else? Why was he hanging out in front of my car like he had nowhere better to be?
"Yeah, it is good for me," I said, marching closer to him, barely stopping my finger from poking him in that chest of his. "Do you even know what year it is? If I want to drink, or swear, or screw someone I just met, that's my prerogative, and I don't need some southern asshole judging me for it. You don't know me, buddy, so back off."
Just once, oh-so-briefly, his eyes flashed hot and his hard jaw tightened when I said screw someone I just met. In the space of one breath, I got a sweaty, tangled, moan-inducing vision of him and I in the front of his truck, clothes barely removed, me sprawled across the bench and him hovering above me, braced up by his massive arms as he moved between my legs.
Which would've been an awesome mental image, if I didn't hate him with every annoyed, hangry, exhausted cell in my body.
Yes, I liked the idea of hallucinating, the more I thought about it. A heat-induced mental breakdown. I’d take any sort of explanation, because even as I heard the words come out of my mouth, I desperately wanted to stop them, but I couldn’t.
Like a child might if they started spilling a jar of tiny beads, I wished I could slap my fingers across my mouth and hold all the individual letters forming each individual word and keep them in where they were safe and couldn’t make a horrible mess.
"Lemme guess," he drawled, "you're either from New York or LA"
Beads. Beads were flying everywhere as the jar tipped past the point of no return.
"Bite me. Women like me live all over this country, maybe not in Green Valley, Tennessee, but just about everywhere else."
He scratched the side of his jaw as he watched me. "Oh, I'm sure we've got 'em here too, Angry Girl."
My chin jerked up. "That is not my name."
"I wouldn't know, now would I? You chose not to tell me." He tsked. "Not very friendly of you, if you ask me."
"I didn't ask you," I snapped. I rolled my lips between my teeth, because honestly, I was ready to slap myself across the face. “S-sorry,” I forced the words out, even though it physically hurt my jaw to do so. “I’m a little … hungry. I haven’t eaten in a while.”
A nightmare, I thought desperately. Let this be a nightmare.
But no, even in my nightmares, I wouldn't have conjured this. So maybe I wasn't little miss sunshine with everyone, but my mother would rip my ear off if she could hear me speak to a stranger the way I was speaking to him.
But … I couldn't stop.
Why couldn’t I stop?
On the verge of absolute hysteria, I thought about what I’d said to my dad, about a man falling prostrate before me as soon as I got into town.
Instead, here I was, channeling every hidden psychotic shred of my DNA into this one entirely innocent person who had the terrible misfortune of being the first one to find me on the side of the road.
He walked toward his truck, only pausing to hold out his hand for his cell phone, which I slapped down onto his palm. Inexplicably, it made him grin.